A few things to catch up on, after the Bloody Scotland shortlisting:
Here's an interview with me, Natalie Jayne Clark and Claire Wilson on the UK Crime Bookclub channel:
It just goes to show how terrible I am at social media and self-promotion more generally that I haven't got round to updating this blog with my latest piece of news. Anyway, The Unrecovered has been shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize, which will be judged on 12th September in Stirling.
Bloody Scotland is a literary festival specifically for crime fiction. I was interviewed on their podcast when the novel first came out (I wrote about it here), and although I wasn't sure if my book strictly counted as crime, it certainly counts as a literary mystery. I'll be on a panel with the other shortlisted authors (David Goodman, Natalie Jayne Clark, Foday Mannah and Claire Wilson) on the 12th, just before the prize announcement.
I'll also be appearing on a panel on the 14th September, with Sarah Hornsley and David Reynolds, entitled 'Gamekeepers Turned Poachers', looking at the experience of writers who have worked in other parts of the publishing industry:
There should be another couple of podcast interviews lined up with me and the other shortlisted authors over the next few weeks. I'll add the details here when I can.
I have an odd relationship with Stirling, on the whole. I was born there, but only lived there for my first 20 months or so, before my family moved to Trinidad for the next four years. For a couple of years, roughly 2000 - 2002, I lived down the road in Larbert and would head into the town regularly (because there was absolutely nothing to do in Larbert). Then, in the sceond half of 2004, I lived on my own in a poky flat on Cowane Street while working at the Waterstones in the Thistle Centre, before moving to Dumfries for a while. And now its the scene of The Unrecovered's first shortlisting for anything, so hopefully all these earlier attachments and associations bring me luck on the night.
The copy edits on the second novel* are done and have been sent back to Bloomsbury, and the next stage is to await the proofs for a last check-through before the book goes into production. Did I say a last check-through? Of course not; there will inevitably be half a dozen other chances to drag my resisting eyes through the text, cringing at every single word, until the book is actually published. I found with The Unrecovered that there was a strange cooling-off period lasting two months or so after the novel came out. During that time I absolutely hated the thing, and it was only after I had some distance from it that I could look on it with even the vaguest equanimity. I'm hoping that period is a bit more condensed this time round. This second novel was much harder to write and involved a lot more research, but going through the copy edits made me feel that I might actually have got close to what I was trying to achieve. It'll be interesting to see if that holds up when I look through the proofs.
I've also finished the very rough first draft of a third novel, the last part of my tentatively connected, thematically linked trilogy (which isn't a trilogy) about war, history and trauma, filtered through the lens of the supernatural. If The Unrecovered hints towards the gothic mystery, the second novel is going to be a sort-of ghost story, while this third novel hints towards cosmic horror. All three of these books are attempting to make their metaphors concrete; to use what the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro called 'the mask of genre'**, employing the fantastical to decipher and renew a shop-worn reality. As is my usual practice, I've printed out the typescript of this third book and will spend the summer carving it down and refining it as much as possible before sending it on to my agent in the autumn.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the year, unless it's tinker away at this third book until it's ready to submit. I've got plenty of ideas for a possible next novel, but it might be wiser to step away from the notebook for the time being. If you have a general facility for writing, there is such a thing as writing too much after all...
* Such is the opacity of publishing, I've no idea whether the title and plot of this second novel is a closely-guarded industry secret, but I'll keep everything unnamed for the moment.
** I cannot find the reference for this quote anywhere, but I'm sure del Toro said it. It probably comes from his superb book Cabinet of Curiosities.
I am currently working through the copy edits on my second novel. Copy-editing (or should that be 'copy editing'?) is the most mysterious and most mundane part of the book-wrangling process, and the last piece of the puzzle before the text is sent off to be typeset. It's where the copy editor makes you look good, by picking up on and correcting typos, childish misspellings, clumsy grammar and/or general infelicities, and ensuring the whole internal cohesion of the book, so that Mondays aren't followed by Wednesdays, or characters with brown hair don't suddenly have black hair a hundred pages later. Those are the mundane parts (and like most mundane things, essential).
The mysterious part comes from the sense of another creative intelligence looking over your text and, very subtly, saying something like: Hmm... Well I wouldn't have done it quite like that...
A good copy editor is worth their weight in gold, and after my experience on The Unrecovered I'm pretty sure I've got a very good one. She's saved me from all sorts of minor mistakes, but there's still that wry sense of challenge whenever a word has been quietly replaced with something a little smoother. Sometimes the suggestion is a very good one, sometimes I'd prefer my original choice, and sometimes I really do want a comma there. I like this though. It forces you to look at things anew, and weigh up your choices once you've got a bit of distance from them. Going through the copy edits can be tedious in the extreme but, like everything in the publishing business, it really is in service of the quality of the book. It's the stage after this - going through the proofs - that's the real killer...
I've had a handful of events and interviews over the last couple of weeks, all of which went far better than I feared. I'm not a natural performer by any stretch of the imagination, but I found myself really enjoying these.
First of all, an interview with the new Bloody Scotland podcast, which can be found wherever you get your podcasts etc.
Bloody Scotland has been flying the flag for Scottish crime fiction for a number of years, and I was initially unsure why I'd been asked to talk to them. The Unrecovered might be many things (a new Scottish classic according to some discerning readers; a load of boring rubbish according to other, less discerning readers...) but it's definitely not a crime novel. However, there's certainly a mystery element to the story, one based in myth, legend and landscape rather than human action, and there's a reasonable amount of blood. It feels like Bloody Scotland are expanding their remit to cover this kind of fiction as well, and talking with Bob McDevitt and Lin Anderson (a celebrated crime author herself) made for a really interesting chat. As I reminded him, Bob used to work with my mum in the now-defunct branch of Waterstones at the east end of Princes Street in Edinburgh, all the way back in the 1990s. The world of writing and publishing, especially in Scotland, is exceptionally small ...
Next was an event with the Far From the Madding Crowd bookshop in Linlithgow, which took place at the beautiful St Peter's Church on the High Street.
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| The sermon about to begin... |
There was a good crowd of around 20 people and it was chaired by Sally, the manager. This was a really rewarding conversation, especially as I got to delve into my process a bit, and the questions at the end were great. There's nothing better than when an astute reader notices something in your novel that has escaped your own attention - it makes the whole process feel incredibly mysterious, and that you've been accessing levels you didn't consciously understand when writing it. And the setting for this event was just gorgeous, one of the most beautiful little churches I've ever seen.
Finally, a bigger event in East Linton hosted by Night Owl Books, and chaired by the manager Rebecca.
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| The crowd begins to gather... |
Well over 30 people came to this, and it never ceases to amaze me that people would be willing to give up their time to come and hear me ramble on about my book. Again, the converstation was wide-ranging, I got to really dig into aspects of the novel and the whole journey to publication, and the questions at the end were great. I signed loads of books afterwards, including from someone who had already read the novel twice (!) and who said it was inspiring them to write their own fiction. That is high praise indeed, and really humbling. This was a great event, and Rebecca is to be commended for running these so well.
I don't have anything else lined up events-wise at the moment. I was hoping to get offered something from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, but given their funding woes I think I might have to wait for next year. In any case, I've surprised myself by enjoying these, once the initial nerves are overcome. In the run-up to the book launch in February I would idly daydream about changing my name and getting a job in the Hebrides on a fishing trawler rather than go through the nightmare terror of a public speaking event, but once they're underway they can be incredibly rewarding. It turns out I might be a secret egomaniac, and I quite like having a captive audience forced to listen to me wax lyrical about my own work. Who would have thought?
This hardback edition of the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes is my most treasured possession. I was given it as a leaving present by my friends and colleagues at the Notting Hill branch of Waterstones in London, all the way back in October 2003. I’d worked there for only a year or so, but it was the among the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it was a sad day when I learned recently that the branch is now defunct.
As
can be seen above, everyone signed the endpapers for me, and to this day I can
remember them all exactly. One of the many drawbacks of moving around a lot
when you’re younger is that you end to replace one group of friends with
another, and it becomes harder to stay in touch with the people you leave
behind. Anyway, to Ian, Gilles, Mette, Serene, Freddie and (especially) Kirstin
– I hope you’re all doing well, wherever you are.
This collected volume had
just been published that year, and although I’d been a Ted Hughes obsessive for
about a decade there was much in it that I hadn’t read before. I can’t remember
the exact moment I became aware of Hughes, but it was almost certainly through
reading Sylvia Plath when I was a teenager. (Although now I think of it, I had
read his superb children’s book The Iron Man when I was about seven, so
Hughes is probably the writer with whom I’ve had the longest relationship.)
There’s an inevitable, prurient fascination in the darkness and tragedy that
surrounds Hughes’s life, and we may as well get it out of the way here. As
everyone knows, Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and Hughes was blamed
for it for decades. His lover Assia Wevill then committed suicide in 1969, in
identical circumstances to Plath, killing their four year-old daughter Shura
before taking her own life. The idea that Hughes was some patriarchal monster
forcing these women to kill themselves was common currency in some critical
circles for decades, but I think it was definitively cut off by the publication
of his late collection Birthday Letters in 1998, and by the publication
of his selected letters in 2007. All of the above is biography and gossip, not
literature, although it’s clear the colossal emotional pain Hughes suffered
from these tragedies fed into his darkest writings in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Seamus Heaney called
Hughes ‘a guardian spirit of the land and the language,’ a poet who ‘internalised
the historical crises of the British nation and the ecological crises of planet
earth’, and it was this completeness of poetic vision that first drew me to his
work; his vivid strangeness, the perspective on the natural world that was
somehow both tender and fierce, alive to violence and death at the same time as
seeing those struggles as inherent and valuable parts of a greater and eternal
whole. I suspect most readers of Hughes find initial value in his animal poems
and his poetry of the natural world, the early lyrics from his first
collections The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. Poems like the
much-anthologised ‘The Thought-Fox’ and ‘The Jaguar’, or ‘Pike’ and ‘Wind’ show
this early gift for embodiment and a richly unsentimental sympathy. Sometimes
it feels as if this perspective is more empathetic than sympathetic, as though
it’s coming from within the natural world rather than being imposed on
it from outside. Alice Oswald, the clearest inheritor of Hughes’s mantle,
describes him as less of a natural poet than a preternatural one, his animals
emerging from some dark, metamorphic space, changed by his knowledge of the
deep roots of mythology and folklore. The startling adjectives and adverbs
imbue these creatures with shocking strangeness; they are estranged from our
common, desultory understanding of them. The jaguar in his cage ‘[…] hurrying
enraged/Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes/On a short fierce
fuse’. A sparrow ‘whets his stub weapon’ on a branch in ‘Sunday Evening’, and in
‘Thrushes’ the birds seem less like humble garden visitors than heralds of
cataclysm: ‘Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,/More coiled
steel than living’.
It would be a mistake to
see the Hughesian eye in this period turned only to the animal life that
surrounded him though. Contemporary politics was of no interest, but Hughes had
an unusually intense identification with the bloody horrors and sacrifices of
the First World War, which puts him in much closer communion with the war poets
Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, David Jones and Robert Graves (especially the
last two) than you might think. Hughes’s father and uncle were both veterans of
that war, and he often spoke of how the Yorkshire valleys where he grew up,
well into the 1950s, still seemed in deep mourning for the local boys who had
been killed. Poems like ‘Bayonet Charge’ and ‘Six Young Men’ are superb
imaginative engagements with battle and human suffering, exploring with anger
and compassion the experiences of men like his father.
The prevalence of
mythology and folklore in Hughes’s poetry began to intensify into the late
1960s. His 1967 collection Wodwo initialled the change, a combination of
poetry and short stories that seems formally inventive for the period. (‘Rain
Horse’, later reprinted in the story collection Difficulties of a Bridegroom,
is one of the best short stories ever written.) It was 1970’s Crow: From the
Life and Songs of the Crow that solidified Hughes’s deepening and
incredibly dark obsession with the lineaments of folk tales and myth, something
that continued for much of the decade that followed. The sequence is an
unstable text, with Hughes adding and subtracting individual poems from it,
hiving some of them off to other collections, or keeping handfuls sequestered
in either limited edition pamphlets or uncollected altogether. It was intended
to be an epic folk-tale, with Crow as a trickster figure, cowardly and selfish,
created by God in some horrified impulse; ‘a black rainbow/Bent in emptiness’,
‘Screaming for Blood/Grubs, crusts/Anything’. Creation itself is a horror, a
roiling arena of sexual depravity and bloodshed, investigated by Crow in all
his mocking curiosity. This solidification (some would say ossification) of Hughes’s
interests and themes from a natural to a
mythological world has an attendant loosening of form. The Crow poems are not
so much free verse as a destruction of poetic form and a rough stitching of it
back together, in lines and stanzas of savage violence, black irony and bitter
sarcasm. The poems are difficult, ugly in places, thrilling, disturbing – ripe
for parody in many ways, as only the most stylistically distinct work can be. Hughes
was to stick with this more abrasive style in works like Cave Birds,
inspired by the grotesque, caricatural work of his friend, the artist Leonard
Baskin, and in what might be the strangest book ever written; 1977’s Gaudete.
A loosely versified narrative, Gaudete recounts the abduction of an
Anglican clergyman into the underworld and his replacement by a duplicate
changeling crafted from a rotten tree stump, who then goes on to minister to
his parishioners in a distinctly sexual manner. To say that by this point we’re
a far cry from the intimate natural histories of The Hawk in the Rain would
be something of an understatement.
Hughes’s work slowly returned
to a richer and more intimate engagement with his subjects though, the
apocalyptic and alchemical interests becoming more restrained (as in his 1989
collection Wolfwatching), and the natural world explored and recreated
through more a tender, caressing observation. ‘A Cranefly in September’ is a work
of both intimately close detail and visionary transformation, the titular
insect ‘blundering with long strides, long reachings’ as it traverses a patch of
grass, the poet’s eye imbuing it with a greater valence as he notes ‘Her
jointed bamboo fuselage’ and ‘the simple colourless church windows of her wings’.
In the end, after adorning the insect with a kaleidoscope of similes and
images, and personalising it as ‘her’, the cranefly must also be seen as an
evolved creature of matter and chemicals fulfilling its instinctual function: ‘The
calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate/To plot her through the infinities of
the stems.’
Remains of Elmet
and River return Hughes to the landscapes of his childhood, while Season
Songs, a collection written ‘in hearing’ of children, and Moortown Diary
reflect his growing involvement with farming and agriculture. Moortown Diary
is surely one of the greatest collections about man’s engagement with the land
ever written, an intimate portrait of the bloody realities of farming life that
nevertheless finds a strange calm and equipoise in the rough business of
dehorning cattle, shearing sheep, and overseeing the birth of calves, ‘Collapsed
wet-fresh from the womb’. It is about man’s often vexed relationship not with
landscape, but the land; a needed thing, obdurate and stubborn, a
dishcloth that must be wrung out for the very last drop of human sustenance.
This balance and contrast
between the shamanic Hughes and the Wordsworthian keeper of the land meant that
he is probably the only major poet since Tennyson to have made a success of the
Laureateship, when he was appointed in 1984. He spoke of the position in
explicitly shamanic terms; if the crown is the symbol of the unity of the
tribe, then the Laureate can represent and give voice to the spiritual unity of
that tribe. Unpromising occasions like the christening of Prince Harry produced
poems like ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’, a rushing, water-soaked work that flows through
the rivers and streams that pour across Devon, an incantatory roll-call of
river names that seems to make an implicit, Arthurian connection between the
fertility of the crown and the fertility of the land. In a letter from 1979,
Hughes noted that all creative work to him was ‘a conjuration, a ritual
summoning of all energies associated with the subject matter’.
Two more great works were
to follow before his death in 1998. The nourishing, imaginative topography of
myth hadn’t left him, and in Tales From Ovid Hughes turned to one of the
original sources, adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses into rich, indecorous
poems of an overwhelming blank verse that feels hewn out of stone. Here capricious
gods wield infinite power, the transformations of man to animal a metamorphosis
of unrivalled horror. Even Martin Amis (a natural Philip Larkin man more than a
Ted Hughes man) called the book ‘masterful.’ It was 1998’s Birthday Letters
though that sealed the poetic career and capped this later flowering of genius.
It was the first time he had engaged in his work with the suicide of Sylvia
Plath, and it was clear from this collection of stunned conversations, unflinching
and interrogatory, that he had been working on it since her death in 1963. The
book was a colossal bestseller, but even if people were reading it for prurient
reasons they could not have been unaffected by the emotional power of Hughes’s
verse. It won every prize going, and as if to underline its significance as his
last word on the matter, he died of cancer only nine months later. Typically,
he suspected he had contracted the disease because he had spent too much time
writing prose, instead of poetry.
Of all his works Birthday
Letters has the most emotional resonance for me. I’ve always been deeply
suspicious of the shallow, tote-bag slogan idea that literature can be ‘healing’,
or that it has some magical analgesic effect (as if a d headache can be shifted
by a dose of Shakespeare instead of two paracetamol and a glass of water), but Birthday
Letters was one of the only books I could read in the aftermath of my
mother’s death in 2012. I would get up early every day that summer and sit in
the garden at my father’s house, drinking a coffee and reading and re-reading
this book, unable to let it go. It was an anchor in many ways, a lifejacket. It
felt like Hughes was invocating his grief directly into my heart, and that this
shared sorrow was somehow both deepening my own grief and making it more bearable.
The poems are concentrated moments, flickers of disbelief and understanding,
roving attempts to find meaning in detail and significance in the
half-remembered and the painfully exact. The language is sometimes plain,
sometimes achingly beautiful. On his first meeting with Plath, in ‘St Botolph’s’,
accompanied by another lover: ‘Falcon Yard:/Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow’,
or in the starkly titled ‘Error’: ‘I brought you to Devon. I brought you into
my dreamland./I sleepwalked you/Into my land of totems.’ The collection gives a
retrospective understanding to Hughes’s entire body of work, that he was in many
ways trying to exorcise deaths that he felt responsible for. In the folkloric
mode that he made his own, the condemned man must descend into the underworld
in order to be transformed. Here, Hughes is plummeting into his memories, his
guilt and grief. He is bringing back the brightest ore, and like a blacksmith is
hammering it into astonishing new shapes.
The idea of having a ‘favourite
writer’ is a bit reductive, a Top Trumps approach to literature that denies
what makes any writer most engaging. Different writers, different books, provide
different experiences, and it’s the collective, multivalent voice that most
attracts. I could no more take only one book to a desert island than I could
take nothing, but if I was forced to choose then perhaps this hardback of Ted
Hughes’s collected poems would come with me. He is the complete writer in terms
of how much he has infiltrated my imagination and affected the way I view the world,
both outside and inside. He is not just a poet or a critic, but a vehicle for
the English language, a storehouse of all its richness and power, recharged
from the abyssal wellsprings of myth and folklore. There’s something almost
autochthonous about him, and his voice is woven through all the thickets of my
obsessions and interests. Like Martin Amis (his antithesis, in many ways), he
writes with originality, euphony and force of expression; for me, the
triumvirate of aesthetic virtues. Michael Hofmann, another poet and critic I
revere, boldly said that Hughes was the greatest English poet since Shakespeare.
Appropriately, the one book of his I haven’t read is his incredibly
idiosyncratic 1992 critical study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete
Being. I plan to read it this summer, and perhaps then, once I’ve absorbed
everything by him, I’ll move on from my Ted Hughes obsession. But I suspect
not.
‘There is no better way
to know us/Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.’
Thursday 13th February 2025, a day that shall live in infamy...
Yesterday my debut novel 'The Unrecovered' was published, and we had the book launch at Golden Hare Books in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. (A short informative sentence that encapsulates pretty much everything I've been working towards for about 25 years.)
In the afternoon my editor Alison took me around various bookshops to sign stock (which made me feel like a proper writer) and then in the early evening we headed to Golden Hare.
Mary Paulson-Ellis was the best chair I could have hoped for, an incredibly astute reader who steered the conversation into very interesting terrain. It's a strange thing to discuss your work like this, because it forces you to examine much of what is either inchoate or intuitive in your writing, teasing out themes or correspondences of which you might not have been consciously aware. I also did a short reading and fielded questions from the audience, and the hour was over much faster than I thought it would be. It was great to catch up with old friends and to see the novel firmly launched into the uncertain seas of literature. And then to start drinking heavily afterwards.
I have heard other writers speak of a strange sense of anti-climax once a book has finally been published, but it definitely feels like a point of culmination for me, having spent so long trying to get here. Reviews and sales and so on are all out of my hands now, and not really worth worrying about (although obviously I hope for colossal critical and commercial success...) The reviews so far have been great and hopefully there are more to come, but the book is the thing. It's out there now, for people to spot on a table or a shelf in the bookshops, to read if they choose, or to pass over in favour of something else. I certainly hope people take a chance on it.